Monthly Archives: June 2016

This month of June, another awesome lineup for PS Plus Free games are currently available from June 9th to July 6th, starting off with:

1.) NBA 2K16 (PS4):NBA 2K16 looks better than ever. The player models are upgraded with new, more detailed body scans, and that has a profound effect on the overall experience. Faces, hair styles, body types, and even wingspans are true to life, but the wide variety of new signature animations bring it all together. I always found it easy to score by cheezing my way past AI defenders, running in circles and forcing them to make unrealistic mistakes. All of that is gone this year. Zig-zagging will result in steals and frustration, and attempts to drive the baseline will end up in terrible or blocked shots. The only reliable way to score is to use real basketball concepts, so if you’re a student of the sport you’ll find yourself being rewarded for your knowledge. NBA 2K16 is one of the best free games of the year I guarantee that! Thank you so much Playstation!

2. Tropico 5 (PS4):I have been playing Tropico back in my highschool days and I was definitely eager to find out how it plays on the Playstation 4.. I am happy to announce that Tropico 5 offers an awesome experience on the PS4, Nice thing about Tropico is that you can play it with different styles. It is great fun to experiment. You can try to be nice, keep your people happy and keep yourself at power by elections. Or you can ban the elections and just keep yourself at power by military exploiting your people to get as much cash as possible. Hoping the rebels will not destroy your palace. You can run the police, prison and order assassinations to get rid of most problematic citizens. Again – the deep simulation of this game makes this fun. You can kill crime lords and rebels making your lands safer for you, but you will make unhappy all the family members, etc.

I also like that raw resources on the island are limited. This forces you to update your strategy and plan for the future. At the beginning you will really heavily on mining. But you need to expect that all mines will run out. And if you don’t prepare yourself in time, you will cut yourself from cash. So from one strategy you slowly need to start depending on tourists, offices, production from imported goods, etc. Again, Tropico 5 is one of the best city building game on the Playstation 4 right now.

3.) God of War: Ghost of Sparta (PSVita):
Set between God of War and God of War II, Ghost of Sparta picks up right at the end of God of War, with Kratos sitting upon his newly claimed throne looking appropriately grumpy. After all, becoming a god didn’t remove the disturbing memories of his past, but now he’s being plagued by a vision we’ve never seen before — an old woman lying sick on a slab of stone. Convinced he can actually change this vision, Kratos sets off for Atlantis on a quest that eventually takes him back to his home of Sparta and into the realm of Thanatos, god of death.

As far as the Gameplay is concerned, there’s nothing super unique here, but that’s not a bad thing and in fact, the game is very awesome! You’ll still spend your time slaying countless enemies, traversing dangerous domains, and solving light puzzles. Combat has been perfected throughout the series, so there’s not a lot to improve upon, and too much change would have been jarring. That said, there is a brand new weapon and two new magical attacks that add something new to the experience.

4.) LocoRoco Midnight Carnival (PSVita)

Once again, the LocoRocos adapt to their circumstances, but they won’t be using any of the skills that they had within LocoRoco 2; instead, you’ll be wielding a new ability called Boings, which can be used to perform gigantic jumps or bounce from one area to another. By performing Boings, you can accelerate your blob as well as create a combo, which adds points to your score and allows you to effectively climb walls or other surfaces to get to new areas. The inclusion of the Boing is an awesome element, and something that you’ll wish had been in the earlier games as well.

However, it also highlights the difficulty of Midnight Carnival, as you’ll need to master this technique to simply pass the stages within the game. Each one of the stages in the game is rated by the difficulty of obstacles that you’ll face. At first, things seem relatively similar to the previous LocoRoco games, but as you approach and pass the halfway point on that meter, the difficulty curve skyrockets, which can severely test any LocoRoco veteran’s patience. For example, there are some sections that require split-second Boings or you’ll instantly fall into a chasm or onto a large strip of spikes, effectively destroying your blob. The fact that Midnight Carnival includes a continue system that drops you off in the middle of a map (for a fee that provides you with three additional chances to survive the level) is an indication of just how difficult the gameplay is. In fact, unless you’re willing to put up with frustration, you probably won’t like this game.

Even with all these issues, Midnight Carnival manages to capture the same visual panache of the franchise perfectly. The light and cheery visuals scattered throughout will easily bring a smile to your face, and watching your blobs slide and bounce through the different environments is still a lot of fun to watch. The music is just as stellar as always, and you’ll be hard pressed to not find yourself humming or singing along with the songs from each level.

5.) EchoChrome: Primal (PS3):
Echochrome hosts an extremely basic presentation: a series of platforms are suspended in “mid-air” against a backdrop of pure white. Among those platforms is a wire frame figure which continually walks along the platform its on, as well as up to four shadowy “echoes” of that figure scattered across the rest of the stage. The goal of the puzzle is to start at one point with the wire frame figure, collect all of the echoes in any order that the player chooses, and return to the starting point before time runs out. To put it simple it is a puzzle game that uses perspective as a method of solving the puzzles of each stage. That might sound relatively basic, until you realize that most of these platforms are separated by large gaps in space, riddled with holes that can make the figure fall, and jump pads that can propel the figure away from its intended path and in a new direction.

6.) Siren – Blood Curse Episodes 1 – 2 (PS3)
Blood Curse returns the series to the doomed village of Hanuda, the setting of the original Siren. The game takes place in August 2007 and begins with an American television crew arriving in Hanuda and stumbling upon a horrifying ritual involving human sacrifice. Things only get worse from there. It quickly becomes apparent that virtually everyone in the village is a Shibito, a corpse person. These Shibito are more unsettling than your average mindless zombies because even in their gruesome, decaying states, they maintain a shred of their human identities. Shibito farmers still till the land; a shibito cop patrols the town; and a young shibito girl spends time in her room drawing, producing nothing but mindless scribbles. The game’s story twists and turns back on itself repeatedly, weaving a narrative that some will love analyzing but others will find needlessly baffling. The story’s best asset, though, is in its cast of seven playable characters, a good assortment that includes a vulnerable 10-year-old girl, a brave high school student, and a mysterious, cool-as-ice Japanese doctor.

Siren: Blood Curse’s episodic structure also keeps things engaging. The game is divided into twelve TV-style episodes, and each comes complete with a quick recap at the beginning and a preview of the next episode at the end. Each episode, in turn, is divided into chapters. No single chapter is very long, so you’re constantly jumping from one character to another and from one gameplay style to another. In one chapter you may be alone, armed, and able to handle yourself in a fight, while in the next you may have to escort another character to safety, or avoid contact with the enemy altogether. Trust me, this game is very scary and the Stealth and escort missions are elements that could quickly drag a game down, but by constantly changing things up, Blood Curse keeps things moving at a steady clip.

Blood curse is an unusual game that finds an unusual, terrifying kind of success.

Another batch of free games for PSN Plus players with NBA2K16 and Tropico 5 as the standout. Who knows what’s coming next! We Know PlayStation is the best Console out there so let’s chill, relax and play on Playstation!